Friday, July 15, 2005

33Mhz of Blazing Speed!

I recently upgraded my home pc to keep it up with modern times. Also so I can play the latest games and other goodies. Not to mention, i HATE waiting for a pc to load up a program or start up. It should be fast and efficient! As I was upgrading the hardware, I thought back to my families first PC we used. It was 1985 and my dad brought home an IBM X386 model office pc. I dont remember the official name of it or anything. I just remember it laid down flat and was beige. It had a 20MB hard drive, a 5-1/4 inch floppy drive and a 13 inch green text monitor. The poor thing must have had MAYBE 20kb of onboard RAM. But we were so excited when he brought it home, we actually had a PC!! When you powered it up, the fan was so loud you almost had to raise your voice to talk over it. Average boot up time was about 8 minutes. I remember this because I used to hit the power switch (and it actually was a red flip switch) and then go get my drink and sandwhich to snack on while at the pc.

The operating system was only an early version of DOS. Which meant the system booted up to a blank screen with a blinking C:\_ . Oh, the fun. Ha! The first program I got for it was Wheel of Fortune. The graphics were, in all terms... pathetic. But since I had never really seen computer graphics before, they were cool. A choppy, green animated Vanna White would walk across the screen to reveal the letters during play. Hours of excitement I tell you. I later found and loaded up some type of spread sheet software, I believe it was a Lotus office product. I thought this was really cool because I could track my current soccer teams wins, losses and stats. I would create a roster spread sheet and track everyone's goals and assists. I was now, a "computer guy"! hahaha

I often think back, comparing what I use now to what we had then. That little pc ran at a blazing fast 33mhz. My current home pc runs at 3Ghz, or, roughly 3000mhz. The old IBM, as I mentioned, had 20kb (kilobytes) of on board RAM. My current machine packs a mere 1.75 GB (gigabites) of RAM. The IBM's hard drive was a whopping 20mb, large for current 1985 standards. Currently at home, I have 200GB of hard drive storage space. There is no way I could have fathomed those specs on a home computer back then. It really amazes me. But, im sure one day i'll re-read this post and laugh at the puny specs I had in my home computer back in 2005. Man i love computer stuff.